The weather is clearing here in Sydney, just in time for the marches against Conroy’s ham-fisted plan to cripple internet access for ordinary Australians. There are marches organised for all capital cities, the earliest will be Brisbane’s starting at 11am (other 11am starts are using Summer Time).
In more web filter news:
SMH: New hurdle for net censorship
The ultra-conservative politician known for his attempts to censor television has strongly opposed the Government’s plans to introduce mandatory internet censorship, highlighting the policy’s lack of support across the political spectrum.
The proposed filters would not have blocked any of the 15,000 child porn videos and half a million child abuse images uncovered by police in a major sting this week as they cannot filter traffic on peer-to-peer networks – only websites.
This from last week: Cash floods in for anti-censorship protests
Political activists GetUp have raised over $30,000 in less than a day to support their fight against the Government’s plan to censor the internet, a response the group has described as “unprecedented”.
The money will be put towards an advertising blitz designed to inform the public of the consequences of the plan, which experts say include slower internet speeds, significant false positives, failure to stop people from subverting the filters and the risk that the blacklist will be expanded to include the blocking of regular pornography, political views, gambling and pro-abortion sites.
And here’s an article from the UK on how simple it is for students there to hack out of the current school-wide web filters to view whatever they like using proxy avoidance sites. How long exactly do Conroy and the other hand-wringers think it will take for sites to spring up that offer detailed explanations via peer-to-peer networks on how to beat the proposed ISP-level filter through changing the settings on computers at home, work and school so that they access overseas proxy-servers? And how many people do they think will change their settings accordingly just to get a faster web download speed, once Conroy’s filter chokes our local bandwidth?
Categories: ethics & philosophy, technology
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Hoyden About Town 
I went to the protest in Melbourne today, it was good to see so many people there despite the weather never letting up ^^;
Under the proposed system, how could settings be changed in order to avoid a slowdown? Surely all web traffic will still have to pass through the ISP’s filter and thus be slowed, even if it manages to avoid detection.
Fmark, as yet I have not investigated this fully, in the hope that I never need it. However, people with far more techgeek cred have assured me that it is a fairly simple hack, one that many people would be able to learn to do.
I am taking a survey on my blog about this:
http://www.covenanteyes.com/blog/2008/12/10/sex-and-politics-australias-new-political-party-takes-on-the-mandatory-internet-filter/
Stop by and leave your thoughts!